Quick commerce is making slow progress towards decent work in the Netherlands

Quick commerce is making slow progress towards decent work in the Netherlands

Online grocery delivery businesses in the Netherlands have been accused of “trying to find paths toward profitability that essentially lead over the backs of workers” but delivery riders and their trade unions are fighting back.

(FNV Young & United via Facebook)

Joseph Skull joined Gorillas in January 2021 for the same reason that a lot of riders joined the online grocery delivery business at that time – it was one of the few companies hiring during the second wave of the pandemic.

At first, Skull, a 25-year-old who moved from the United Kingdom to Amsterdam to pursue a degree in economics, enjoyed the work. But as the company grew bigger, he started to feel irritated at management’s decreasing attention to safety, the intractable understaffing and the stagnation of riders’ wages in spite of rising living costs.

Then, Storm Eunice made its way to the Netherlands in February 2022. Although the Dutch government sent out text alerts instructing people to stay indoors, Gorillas kept taking orders in Utrecht, a city situated 35 kilometres from Amsterdam. “I got really angry that people had been sent out to ride in those conditions,” says Skull. “That’s when I started my activism.”

Skull is one of the roughly 10,000 riders working in quick commerce, or q-commerce, in the Netherlands. These companies, which include players like Gorillas, Flink, Getir, Zapp and Picnic, promise to deliver on-demand groceries to consumers within minutes from a network of local distribution hubs, also known as dark stores. They have grown at a neck-breaking speed across Europe, buoyed by hundreds of millions of euros in venture capital and pandemic stay-at-home orders. Gorillas, which launched in the Netherlands in December 2020, today has 2,000 dark stores in Amsterdam alone.

As the companies have grown, concerns have also emerged around labour conditions in their distribution hubs as well as in relation to the health and safety of riders.

Unlike companies like Uber and Deliveroo, fast grocery delivery companies typically offer their workers employment contracts. Having conducted inspections at warehouses from four unidentified q-commerce companies in 2021, the Dutch Labour Inspectorate reported various violations of labour standards and working conditions. Many of the inspected companies also had flawed health and safety regimes, with no or incomplete risk assessment and management procedures, and no worker representation or works councils.

“The main focus [of these companies] is profit maximisation – profit, profit, profit. And labour conditions, well, that’s something they have to deal with,” says Fatma Bugdayci-Karatas, a union official for the commerce sector at FNV, the Netherlands’ largest trade union.

What’s behind the labour violations?

In interviews with Equal Times, delivery riders complained about shortages of and inadequate rain gear, low-quality and malfunctioning bikes, mould-covered fridges in warehouses, riders not being allowed paid breaks as well as a highly pressurised working environment. “It’s like opening a restaurant and then you’ve got a kitchen where the oven doesn’t work. And four out of the five burners don’t work and saying: ‘Well, this is fine,’” says AJ, another Amsterdam-based rider who worked for Zapp until it exited the Netherlands and now rides for Gorillas. He did not want to be identified with his full name for fear of the repercussions of speaking to the media.

For Sacha Garben, a professor in EU law at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium who is currently working on a paper about labour conditions in q-commerce for UNI Europa, the European services workers’ union, it’s too early to say what’s behind the reported violations around labour conditions in q-commerce. “Are the legal standards not applicable? Are they not being applied? Or are the standards themselves not sufficient?” she asked, adding that the answer to these questions would be key to formulating the right policy response.

Although labour violations in q-commerce, platform food couriers and the gig economy more generally might seem to pose new, unprecedented concerns because of the novelty of the services provided, Garben says the problems are more deeply rooted:

“Very often, it comes down, like in this case, to saying: ‘Probably we will need to increase resources for labour inspectors.’ We have known that for a long time, but that is something that the abuses in q-commerce underline.”

According to Steven Rolf, a researcher specialising in the platform economy at the University of Essex in the UK, instant delivery companies in any case highlight that putting workers on the payroll isn’t a silver bullet when it comes to resolving concerns around labour conditions in platform work.

“Even within the standard employment relationship, in most economies there’s a lot of space for employers to behave very, very badly. Second, unfortunately, regulators in many countries, in my view, are prepared to tolerate some of these conditions as an alternative to experiencing high levels of unemployment,” he says. Gorillas says it has created 2,000 jobs in the Netherlands since its 2020 launch. Zapp, which exited the Netherlands in the summer of 2022, said it created more than a thousand jobs.

Improving working conditions

The Dutch trade union FNV, along with independent rider-led unions like the now-defunct Radical Riders, has tried to improve working conditions in q-commerce. Realising that riders generally leave a rapid grocery delivery company after just 100 days but tend to continue working in the platform economy – leaving Gorillas to join UberEats for instance – FNV decided to establish a “bottom-up led rider-wide community” in Amsterdam last September, explains Frank van Bennekom from FNV’s young workers section, Young & United. Every week, this group of riders and unionists meet online for a brief check-in to discuss new developments and strategise on solutions.

“We decided to begin in Amsterdam and to use those successes to go to other cities like a snowball and also launch communities there,” says van Bennekom, adding that they also hope to expand the community to riders working for other gig economy players like UberEats and Piknik.

Their first feat was a petition signed by 200 Amsterdam riders delivered to the management of Gorillas, Getir and Flink at the end of December. In the petition, the riders demanded higher wages, to receive their schedules a week in advance, and for healthy and safe working conditions. More broadly speaking, van Bennekom also hopes Rider Community Amsterdam will make another, larger point. “That organising, forming a collective with your colleagues – that that helps,” he says. “That if you unite you can achieve a lot of things.”

FNV has also pushed for delivery riders and warehouse pickers to fall under the same collective labour agreement as employees working in bricks-and-mortar supermarkets.

In December 2021, E-commerce Nederland, an industry group for e-commerce companies, developed a new collective labour agreement for e-commerce companies together with De Unie, a small union that has been accused of operating as a yellow union, or a union dominated by employers. E-commerce Nederland has argued that the e-commerce industry has distinctive characteristics – from their business model and company processes, to their workforce – that set it apart from physical supermarkets, making it difficult to apply the traditional agreement covering physical retailers. The e-commerce collective labour agreement provides a slightly higher minimum wage than the traditional supermarket agreement but doesn’t offer any bonuses for evening, weekend or holiday shifts and overtime.

According to FNV’s Bugdayci-Karatas, the significance of E-commerce Nederland’s move to create a bespoke collective labour agreement should not be underestimated. “This is truly an erosion of the social system in the Netherlands,” she says. “If they can accomplish this in this industry, it’s a matter of time before another industry agrees on a collective bargaining agreement with a cheaper union or a yellow union.”

Undermining labour standards has been a part of the business strategy of a number of fast grocery delivery companies, adds Oliver Roethig, UNI Europa’s regional secretary. “They want to isolate their already precarious workforce in order to give themselves an advantage over traditional commerce players,” he says. “It is a slippery slope that leads to the destruction of the European social model that has delivered dignified working conditions, decent pay and shared prosperity. It is vital for enforcement agencies not to let this slide.”

In September, the Dutch labour ministry sided with FNV and traditional supermarkets and decided that q-commerce companies should abide by the supermarket collective bargaining agreement. E-commerce Nederland has launched legal action over the decision; no court date has been set.

Mounting pressure to make money

Q-commerce companies are also facing other headwinds. As interest rates have risen in the last few months and venture capitalists have closed their wallets, q-commerce players have come under pressure to start turning a profit. Some, like Zapp, have exited the Netherlands to concentrate on other countries. Other players have elected to consolidate and scale up to cut losses, with Getir concluding its acquisition of Gorillas at the end of last year. At the same time, traditional supermarkets like Jumbo and Albert Heijn have also tried to enter the market, either by rolling out their own fast grocery delivery service or by teaming up with existing players.

Workers have been the first ones to feel the impacts of the mounting pressure on q-commerce companies to start making money, says Rolf, the University of Essex researcher. “It’s pushing people to work harder and faster, being more punitive with managerial and contractual arrangements, withdrawing order bonuses that people used to get for meeting delivery targets,” he says. “They are trying to find paths toward profitability that essentially lead over the backs of workers.”

E-commerce Nederland and Gorillas did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Getir declined to comment.

Both Skull and AJ were involved in union efforts – led by Radical Riders and FNV – to improve conditions at the warehouses they worked in, and both achieved some successes.

Skull says Gorillas switched to better bikes after workers pushed for this in meetings with management. Riders were also given personal rider kits, he says (Riders previously shared helmets, waterproof trousers and jackets). AJ says that he approached Zapp’s management with a list of 10 demands, and that they met one of them – the company removed a non-competition clause from their contract.

AJ, who joined Gorillas in September 2022, is currently looking for another job. Ever since he was hit by a motorbike a few months ago during his time off, he has struggled to feel comfortable on a bike. At the same time, he would like to continue riding. “I want to see this labour organising through to the end. Getir is the one, out of all of them, that does have the capacity to disrupt it and change it for the better,” he said referring to Getir’s acquisition of Gorillas. “It’s been around for much longer, they’ve had a lot of time to fine tune their business model. So we have better bikes and better equipment than all the others.”

This was echoed by Skull, who believes that conditions at Gorillas will improve as a result of a mix of factors – pressure from workers, increasing regulation and, also, self-interest. “I don’t know how much will happen as a result of their goodwill,” he says. “But accidents are bad for the company’s bottom line.”

This article was supported by UNI Global Union.